I'd also like to say as a manager of a bunch of top notch woman engineers, we don't have an abusive environment, we don't have a frat boy environment, and it's friggin awesome. (and we are hiring, PM me :) )
Torvalds’s decision to step aside came after The New Yorker asked him a series of questions about his conduct for a story on complaints about his abusive behavior discouraging women from working as Linux-kernel programmers.
On the topic of women engineers and also as a manager of top-notch woman engineers: wholly agree. For the Moneyball readers, I sometimes joke that women engineers are the Greek Gods of Walks when it comes to software development. Which is really just another way of saying that characteristics traditionally associated with women correlate in my experience with skills that are often underestimated in software development and evaluating them with brogrammer-world biases is a competitive disadvantage.